Heidi Alexander Summons NATS Boss Martin Rolfe After London Airport Air Traffic Control Failure

A technical failure in the air traffic control system disrupted departures from major London airports including Heathrow and Gatwick, and NATS said it was investigating a technical incident causing disruptions to departures shortly before 14:00 on Tuesday.

“resulted in the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights”

Reuters

Reuters reported that the hours-long outage on Tuesday resulted in the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, and flights from British airports resumed on Wednesday as questions mounted about the reliability of Britain’s aviation systems.R

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Transport minister Heidi Alexander summoned NATS boss Martin Rolfe to explain what happened, after she said on X, "I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job."

The Guardian said the disruption entered a second day with cancellations passing 1,900, and it quoted Rolfe defending NATS’ resiliency while telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, "We have at this point ruled out a cyber-attack."B

Ryanair called for Rolfe to resign after the outage, and Reuters said Ryanair’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon told the BBC, "We've had minor issues in other places, but nothing at the scale that we see, and consistently see, in the UK."

The Guardian reported that airlines including Ryanair and Wizz called for Rolfe to resign or be sacked by Heidi Alexander, and it quoted Wizz Air UK managing director Yvonne Moynihan saying, "In any industry when you've had three failures, you need to consider three strikes and you're out."

Al Jazeera

Rolfe denied Britain was worse than other countries and told the BBC he believed the cause would be different to previous outages, while NATS said the problem occurred in its flight processing system but was not the same fault as 2023 and 2025 outages.B

As operations restarted, Heathrow told passengers to check with their airline before heading to the airport because schedules would have changed due to the problems on Tuesday, and Reuters said London Gatwick, Luton and Stansted also said they were operating but told passengers to check with their airline first.R

NATS said the system issue was resolved but recovery was taking longer than hoped, and Al Jazeera reported that NATS warned restoring normal operations would take time because of "a very complex recovery" across the aviation network.

“a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network”

Al Jazeera

The Guardian said Cirium data showed more than 1,900 flights in and out of UK airports had been cancelled because of the failure, including 1,750 yesterday out of 5,800 scheduled flights, and it added that 541 were at Heathrow.

AP described passengers stranded for hours on airport runways and in terminals, quoting Josie Donoghue saying, "Getting through that airport was like trying to get out of Alcatraz," after she spent three hours stuck on a plane at Gatwick before her Ryanair flight to Ireland was cancelled.

Heathrow and Gatwick both warned disruption could continue as airlines reposition aircraft and crew, and Reuters reported that Heathrow said it was expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition while working with its local NATS team to recover normal operations as quickly as possible.R